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In December last year, at Britain’s most important motorsport awards presentation in London, Lewis Hamilton received two trophies, including the one for International Racing Driver of the Year. Adding luster to the occasion, the organizers of the ceremony had invited Viviane Lalli Senna, sister of the late Ayrton Senna, as guest of honor, and it was from her hands Hamilton received his trophies.

On several occasions during the 2007 season — his rookie year in Formula 1 — Hamilton had spoken of Brazil’s three-time world champion and how Senna’s example had inspired him in his formative years of racing. He was understandably delighted, and clearly moved, that a member of his hero’s family should be there to hand him the prestigious awards.

“I am a bit speechless,” Hamilton said on stage. “Ayrton played such a big role in my life. Through karting and through other stages of my career, and single seaters, I was always watching his videos and I never imagined how I would get to meet someone close to him.”

For her part, Viviane paid Hamilton an extraordinary compliment when she said she saw some of her brother’s qualities in the British newcomer. “He reminds me of Ayrton as a pilot [driver] and also as a good man — we can see this in his eyes and his face,” she said.

Senhora Lalli knows the racing business well, having accompanied her brother as a spiritual adviser in the year before his death in Italy in 1994. Also, her race-driver son, Bruno, who has chosen to use the Senna name, is currently a winner in the super-competitive European GP2 series. In her daily life, as president of the Ayrton Senna Foundation, she relies on her personal ability to make good judgments in the distribution of funds. The Foundation, which licenses the Senna name for use on luxury products, has already given more than $50 million to help feed and educate underprivileged children in Brazil.

But is it perhaps too early to be making comparisons between Hamilton and Senna? The Englishman undoubtedly shares some of the Brazilian’s prodigious talents behind the wheel, and both men dedicated themselves to racing from early youth. But they each approached the challenge of F1 in different ways, and it is here the comparison falls short.

Almost from the beginning, Senna was a lone ranger. Although his family helped subsidize his rise through karting in Brazil and Europe, then on to single-seater racing in England, he was determined never to lose control of his destiny. He signed his own deals, sometimes breaking them when he considered that to do so would be in his best interests, and he relied on family links only when it came to securing sponsorship.

Hamilton, by contrast, has relied on others to help him in his quest. His father, Anthony, has been an ever-present companion, paying for his karts and then working as his mechanic. Somehow Hamilton Senior managed to combine his son’s racing career not only with building his own business as an IT consultant, but also attending to the special needs of Lewis’s half-brother Nicholas, who has cerebral palsy.

It is not as though Anthony Hamilton was born to the wealth and privilege associated with many race car drivers. The son of immigrants to Britain from the Caribbean island of Grenada, his own father worked on the London Underground (subway) and Anthony was himself employed on the railways for a while.

“You wouldn’t believe the amount of work he’s put into my career,” said Lewis after winning his first GP last year, in Canada. “He had nothing when he was younger. He lost his mum at a young age, and just to see his family be successful is a real pleasure to him.”

Lewis Carl Hamilton (yes, his names are his father’s tribute to the American Olympic athlete) got his first break at the age of 10, in 1995, when his success in a junior karting championship earned him an invitation to attend the same presentation ceremony at which he would encounter Viviane Senna 12 years later. Whether pressed to do so by his father or not, the tot in a tuxedo cheekily introduced himself to McLaren–Mercedes CEO Ron Dennis, announcing that one day he would drive for him.

At first astonished, Dennis diligently followed up the boy’s results and eventually, when Lewis turned 14, signed him to a long-term contract. Under the arrangement with McLaren-Mercedes, Lewis was given the dream racing ticket. His path to the top, via the lower echelons of British and European competition, was paid for in full. The only pressure on him was to win, and without the day-to-day worries of having to find the cash to go racing, he was soon a consistent winner.

McLaren’s help came in other forms, too. There was advice on nutrition and physical training, on investment and on how to handle the press. When he won the GP2 championship in 2006, Lewis was deemed ready to switch to the F1 team, whose cars he had already been allowed to test. He may have been short of F1 experience, but by the time he set off for the opening race of the 2007 F1 season, in Australia, he had completed no fewer than 1000 punishing hours in McLaren’s F1 simulator.

By coincidence, Ayrton Senna was also offered a long-term deal by Ron Dennis in 1982. By then, he was already a regular winner in Formula Ford racing, and if the offer had come a year earlier — when the cash ran out and he returned, briefly disheartened, to Brazil — he might have accepted it. But the streak of Senna independence held firm, Dennis’s proposal was rejected and Senna planned out his career by himself.

This involved accepting a drive for 1984 with the mid-ranking Toleman team. It was immediately clear that Senna was a potential winner, and for 1985 he abruptly switched to the front-running Lotus-Renault outfit. The move came as a surprise to the Toleman management, with whom Senna was obliged to reach a private (cash) accommodation.

While Senna’s betrayal of Toleman cast a minor shadow over his reputation as a man of his word, it publicly demonstrated that he was willing to risk everything in his progress to the world championship that he would win three times. The entire press corps loved him for it, and his adroitness in three languages (Portuguese, Italian, and English) laid the foundations for a relationship that paid off for him both with the media and with a long line of sponsors.

It remains to be seen whether Lewis Hamilton will enjoy the same cordiality with the press. His quick-witted cheeriness has made him a hit with the English-language media, and the meticulous McLaren coaching has been a big help when it comes to performing the corporate tasks which go with the job.

But journalists who don’t have English as their first language are less enthusiastic about Lewis Hamilton. For many of them, the line between self-confidence and arrogance in Hamilton’s character is less well defined. Some of them see in him a ‘manufactured’ sportsman, a personality who owes more to the molding of McLaren than to his own determination.

It is therefore perhaps unfortunate that Hamilton, possibly inspired by the encouragement of Viviane Lalli, is occasionally invoking the name of his hero when speaking in public, as he did after his second win of the season, at Monaco. “This is my favorite circuit, the one [on which] I would want to win more than any other in the world,” he said. “Ayrton won here so many times and I’ve always wanted to … if he could win here, that means the best drivers have been able to win here, so I wanted to be able to do the same.”

Whether he made those statements consciously or not, Hamilton’s gushing enthusiasm invited his audience to make comparisons between his own abilities and those of the great Brazilian. Unfortunately, he seemed not to understand that many racing fans guard their memories of Senna, to keep them precious. Coming from someone with a couple championships behind him, the Englishman’s remarks would perhaps have been acceptable. But Hamilton has only a season and a half of F1 racing to his credit. Inevitably, his words have proved to be an irritant both to his fellow drivers and to a wide range of pressmen.

Far better, it would seem, for him to concentrate on establishing himself as Lewis Hamilton the First and not Senna the Second. At 22, it is hardly as though time is against him.

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